Nobel-prize-awarded reading (yes, really)

2018 does seem to be shaping up to become a better book year for me  than 2017. The Austen Rereading Project, from which I’ve been taking a break the last couple of weeks (I’ll start it up again soon with Persuasion) has made sure that there were at least some books on my reading list which I was sure to like. What’s more, the project seems to have fulfilled its purpose of making me more keen on reading generally again.  I recently, to my immense self-satisfaction, finished Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and what’s more I did enjoy it.

Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature – when they’re not a complete misfire (no names need be mentioned – the answer is blowing in the wind…)  –  tend to be too high-brow for my vulgar tastes. Never Let Me Go seemed a good choice, though, if you wanted to read something Nobel Prize-worthy which was neither too long, too involved or too earth-shatteringly depressing, and so I decided to give it a go. Granted, it’s not exactly a cheerful tale, but the premise isn’t as off-putting as, say, that of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (which I’m never going near as long as I live). I found on starting to read it, too, that the prose style was very clear and easy to follow – thankfully, no thorniness, long sentences or inexplicable wordplay. However, this  is not the only reason I liked the novel, though I’m always grateful to authors who don’t set out to make the readers feel like idiots.

To be honest, I had my doubts about the novel’s premise. When I first read the carefully worded reviews of Never Let Me Go, which implied that there was some sort of twist which the reviewers felt duty bound not to reveal, I thought: “Come on. It’s as clear as day. The characters in this novel are reared to be organ donors. That’s not even an original concept: isn’t it a staple of sci-fi dystopias?” That Never Let Me Go was not a sci-fi novel (though it does depict an alternative reality) did not, in my eyes, make the conceit automatically cleverer, nor did the fact that the protagonists are raised in surroundings that recall the idyllic picture of public school life you often find in classic children’s and young adult fiction. It looked like a forced contrast to me – “oh, look, poor innocent children growing up in a fool’s paradise, not knowing what horrible fate awaits them”.

Never Let Me Go did not turn out to be as crude as that. In fact, crude and polemic are the last things this novel is. It’s a book where the author has really thought through his idea and the different aspects of it, and before long I became gently fascinated by the ins and outs of the setup. So, the pupils of the Hailsham school are marked out to have their organs harvested in later life – after a spell as carers for other donors, they will keep giving donations until they “complete”, that is die. That  much is clear pretty early on. But where did they come from? Why are they encouraged to be “creative”, and why is so much effort put into their education seeing as they don’t have much of a future? As one key player formulates it at the end of the novel, “Why Hailsham at all?”. At one level, the novel reads like a literary thriller where you try to pick up the clues to what goes on in this world. The everyday life of the Hailsham pupils, during and after their time at the school, is rendered with believable detail. They’re not living in some vague thought experiment; their reality seems very real. Also, we sense the very human unease the outside world experiences in connection with them and others in their situation. In the sci-fi scenarios mentioned above, victims of forced organ donations and the like are treated with determined callousness, because it’s a dystopia where pretty much everyone is supposed to be horrible. In Never Let Me Go, people have a conscience, and this has an effect – sometimes good, sometimes bad – on how the donor question is handled.

Another point in the novel’s favour is that it’s narrated by its most likeable progatonist, Kathy H., a girl who may seem naïve but who is in fact very observant. Her closest friends are less interesting: Tommy, the boy she falls in love with, has a healthy curiosity about the reality of their situation, but he’s a blockhead in romantic matters. Ruth, Kathy’s friend and for a long time Tommy’s girlfriend, is a bit of a mean girl, who from the first expects her friends to go along with her self-deceptions in order for her to look better in the eyes of other pupils/students. The power play between the three, and how they’re affected by the presence of others outside of their circle, makes for an engaging read.

I wasn’t heart-broken over Kathy or the other characters, but their fate is affecting enough, and satisfyingly, answers to the questions you have been posing to yourself are provided towards the end. Ishiguro isn’t too fancy to tie up loose ends, for which I was thankful. If you feel up to reading something high-brow and gently melancholy, then Never Let Me Go is a good bet. The Swedish Academy did something right there (you knew that one was coming, right?).            

Victoria series two: I can readily believe it's not Downton

I don't know why I'm quite so dissatisfied with the second series of Victoria as I am, given that it's one of the few programmes that openly try to emulate Downton Abbey. Otherwise, even TV dramas clearly pitched at the Downton audience like The Halcyon tend to have a slightly sniffy attitude towards the show that put the costume drama genre back in fashion. It's as if they wanted to say: "Oh yes, I suppose we're a bit like Downton... only much better". Which makes it all the worse when they fail to measure up.

Now Victoria, on the other hand, wears its debt to Downton proudly on its sleeve. Downstairs storylines? Let's have that. Sensible housekeeper figure under pressure? By all means. Decent maid with a romantic interest in one of the other servants? Check. Cynical manservant? There he is. Dowager Countess quips? Let's age up one of Victoria's ladies a bit and make her a formidable battle-axe. And wait, didn't that gay storyline go down a treat? Let's try that too.

So I suppose I should be more grateful to Victoria for trying to find that magic Downton formula. The problem is, so far - after having seen six episodes out of eight in the second series - I really don't think they're making a very good job of it. The downstairs characters in Victoria are sketchy, and it's hard to care for any of them. I'm assuming that with a few exceptions, like Lehzen, these are made-up characters who have been tacked on to the main historic storyline in order to make it more Downton-y. But here's the thing: Downton took time over and invested in its downstairs characters. Thomas's unhappy crush on Jimmy was such a strong storyline because it mattered. He got his heart broken. It would still have been touching if he'd been pining for a girl, but the gay aspect made his situation all the more hopeless and thus added poignancy (and an element of danger: that idiot Alfred almost had him nicked). Having two fetching but personality-free guys look deep into each others' eyes every time they meet is not the same thing at all. And remember the Bateses? Bates was by far my least favourite main Downton character and annoying to the last degree with his villain-baiting, but his love story with Anna (Joanne Froggatt melted even my Bates-sceptic heart in their scenes together) felt like the real thing, unlike the lacklustre on-off almost-romance between Miss/Mrs Skerrett and Mr Francatelli in Victoria. The only "I can't believe it's not Downton" part of the plot that works OK in Victoria is the Dowager Countess surrogate the Duchess of Buccleugh as played by Diana Rigg. She is fun.

What of the main focus of the series, then, the private life - and occasionally the public duties - of Queen Victoria herself? The good news is that the series does take some time to flesh out the characters of Victoria and Albert. The bad news is, as with The Crown, this isn't exactly the most thrilling of reigns. Jenna Coleman is great as Victoria, and Tom Hughes does his best (and certainly looks the part) as handsome, humourless Albert. However, this can't disguise the fact that very little of interest happens. Also, the series plays fast and loose with history to such a degree that every time something does happen which seems a little extraordinary, my - perhaps unfair - reaction was "Oh, I'm sure they made that up". I'm not usually that strict when it comes to the historic veracity of costume dramas, seeing as I realise what a chore it is to read up on a subject. When the main character is an important historic personage like Victoria, though, it does become a drawback when you don't trust any part of the plot to be true.

The first series was so much taken up with the unfolding love story between Victoria and Albert that I didn't mind the plotlessness so much, although even back then I failed to become engaged in the downstairs storylines. By now, however, it bothers me. It's not as if the political questions the series touches on are handled with any great subtlety. For a royal not known for her strong involvement in government concerns, Queen Victoria does a lot of slapping down of foolish politicans in a way that seems fashioned to appeal to 21th-century viewers. The latest episode I watched, about the Irish Potato Famine, should have been affecting but was hampered by its many clichés. When a saintly clergyman, who wants to help the peasantry (unlike the monstrous English lord who rules the neighbourhood), visits a home where the mother has died of starvation, you can - true enough - hear coughing and a baby crying in the background, as in nine out of ten "privileged well-meaning person is faced with the harsh reality of the poor" scenes. In the end, the haunting Irish song about emigration which was played at the end was more moving than anything that had gone before it.

This is a well-acted, sumptuously produced series, but to be honest, I can't help finding it a bit... boring. What's more, I'm not sure I'm that much better acquainted with the personality of Queen Victoria now than I was before. I do like Robert Peel, though. 

Emma is still the best around

It is time to speak of Emma - not Swan this time, but Woodhouse. I recently finished rereading Jane Austen's Emma, and found to my satisfaction that it's still my favourite Jane Austen novel. We'll see if the rest of my Jane Austen Rereading Project changes that - I suspect that Persuasion will be a strong contender - but what I can say so far is that in my view, Emma actually beats Pride and Prejudice in terms of readability.

It's hard to explain why, though. The novel is by no means action-packed: there are long stretches where nothing much happens. The start is slower than Pride and Prejudice's, as more back-story is fitted in. But once the story got going, it held my interest, even though I knew exactly how the various intrigues were going to end. There are two main attractions with Emma as a novel: the joy of reading a great author at the very top of her game, and the heroine herself.

Austen's prose style is crips and crackling throughout, and her characterisation subtler than in both Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Yes, there's still a certain amount of caricature, but the characters remain believable. You not only think it possible that you could encounter people like this in real life, it's not beyond the reaches of possibility that you could share their weaknesses yourself. I for my part could easily relate to Mrs Elton's shameless sense of entitlement, John Knightley's anti-social tendencies and Harriet Smith's habit of drifting from one intense crush to another, while completely discarding her yearnings for someone who was the star in her sky and the light of her life mere weeks before (that is, until she has reason to be reminded of him again). The characters interact credibly too. For instance, in one dialogue between Mr Weston and Mrs Elton, the former only wants to speak about his son while the latter only wants to speak about herself and her sister and brother-in-law at Maple Grove. How they still manage to hold a longish conversation, negotiating various social niceties more or less adroitly along the way, is fascinating in itself, although what they say isn't vitally important to the plot. This isn't to say that the novel isn't tightly plotted, though. One of the members of The Jane Austen Book Club claims that Austen "could plot like a son of a bitch", and Emma is the prime example of that. Hints about the characters' true feelings and relationships to each other - often misinterpreted by Emma - are skilfully woven into the dialogue, and the reader is given clues in the same way as in a whodunnit.

However, Emma never looks dense for not managing to pick up these clues, or not putting the right construction on them. Her mistakes are understandable ones. Austen famously said about Emma that she was a heroine "whom no-one but myself will like". This was an overstatement: there are quite a few of us who like Emma very well indeed. Not everyone sees the point of her, though. Emma has been unlucky when it comes to film and TV adaptations: they tend to take a critical view. Emma as played by Gwyneth Paltrow was elegant, but on the cold side. Kate Beckinsale was livelier, but hampered by the adapter Andew Davies's dislike of the character. Romola Garai in the latest BBC adaptation is a brilliant dramatic actress, and her despair in such scenes as the aftermath of the Box Hill excursion was spot on, but the lighter, comical register didn't come off equally well. Actually, from the Emmas I've seen, Doran Goodwin in the ancient TV adaptation from the Seventies came closest to conveying some of Emma's warmth and wit, though she was somewhat over-arch and (to be ungallant) plainly not twenty-one.

Most of the adaptations above tend to focus on the least enjoyable aspect of the novel: the notion that Emma needs to be humbled and seek self-improvement in order to deserve happiness. I never like a cautionary tale element in any story, and the misfortunes leading to Emma bitterly blaming herself - as well as being blamed by her friend and future husband Mr (George) Knightley, as likely as not - are a sore trial. I do sometimes wonder whether readers and adapters should really let Emma's self-reproaches (powerfully written as they are) and Mr Knightley's opinions of Emma's behaviour guide them to quite so such an extent as they are apt to do. Mr Knightley, though like Mr Darcy he shapes up towards the end of the book, is a most unsatisfactory love interest. At the beginning of the novel, he says to Emma's dear friend and former governess Mrs Weston that he would like to see Emma "in love, and in some doubt of a return; it would do her good". Does that sound even remotely like a man in love himself? Also, he likes to lecture her about the very things she feels most guilty about, such as not practising her music more and not becoming bosom friends with Jane Fairfax, whose qualities and accomplishments he is quick to praise to a perverse degree, which naturally does little to endear the girl to Emma. Mr Knightley's anger when he finds out that Emma has encouraged Harriet Smith to refuse the upright farmer Mr Martin's proposal is understandable: she does real mischief here, and could have cost two young, well-suited people their happiness. At other times, though, his lecturing is less self-interested. It's partly because he's jealous of Frank Churchill and resents Emma's flirtation with him that he comes down on her so severely at the end of the disastrous excursion to Box Hill.

The Box Hill incident - where Emma thoughtlessly insults the aimable chatterbox Miss Bates - is mostly made a meal of in adaptations. In fact, our perception of Emma's behaviour in this scene has a lot in common with our perception of Pip's behaviour towards Joe in Great Expectations. We mind it because the person behaving badly feels so wretched about it him/herself, because the person slighted is so thoroughly good-natured and because, in spite of their good nature, they do register and are hurt by the slight. When you look at what Emma and Pip actually do, though, it's not that horrible, and well within the scope of normal, selfish, somewhat gauche human behaviour. In Emma's case, I would say it's hardly unheard of to be tempted into a witticism at someone else's expense while imagining that they're unlikely to pick up on it anyway. Austen does a good job of making us care desperately that Emma should put things right with poor Miss Bates as soon as possible, but in terms of causing actual damage, her meddling in the Harriet-Martin affair is far worse. At any rate, there's no reason to tell her off at such length and with so much indignation as Mr Knightley does.           

At the same time, I suppose that Emma's flaws wouldn't seem so forgiveable if she were completely unaware of them herself. It's better that she should blame herself a little too much, and gain the reader's sympathy by doing so, than not blame herself at all when it is called for. We can trust Jane Austen to know what's best for her character. Mr Knightley, though - honestly.